Our series on Oddities takes us to the Caprivi Strip, an elongated strip of land that belongs to Namibia.
As the modern borders between African countries were mostly drawn in European offices as delimitations of spheres of influence, these tend to be regular, following meridians, parallels, and riverbeds. The case of the Caprivi Strip is different. The Germans had conquered a coastal region in southwestern Africa, between the Portuguese in the North and the British in the South. As Germany also held a colony in Eastern Africa, they wanted to be able to reach the Zambezi River, which would allow them to then sail downstream to the Indian Ocean. However, their territorial extent came about 500km short of reaching the Zambezi.
German chancellor Leo von Caprivi thus negotiated a territorial exchange with the British that created this narrow east-west salient, which allowed them to reach the banks of the Zambezi. The following entities - the South African Mandate and the independent nation of Namibia, have kept this territorial oddity to this day.
The Caprivi Strip
